


the two

by tin_girl



Category: Glass no Kamen | Glass Mask
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-27
Updated: 2019-08-27
Packaged: 2020-09-27 21:09:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,844
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20414341
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tin_girl/pseuds/tin_girl
Summary: Have you ever seen me, she whispers in his ear when she gets to him, adjusting his tie, clumsily, only making it more crooked.Hold my peace?





	the two

**Author's Note:**

> This is dramatic on purpose (well, mostly) but it's still _too_ dramatic in places. Also, no one acts like themselves because I'm actually terrible at writing fanfiction, God help me.

The music lived, but the world was dead. And the song would die one day, she thought, but how would the world come back to life? How would its salt come back?

~~Patricia Highsmith, Carol

When Maya learns about it – and Masumi tells her the only way he can, trying to sound casual, looking everywhere but at her, eyes catching on things undeserving of attention and seeing through them to this aching nothingness of his own thoughts, like the hollow hurt of a torn-out tooth – she looks like that day she played Midori. The crushing, childlike disappointment of it, and she’s twenty but she seems about twelve, lip trembling. Masumi almost laughs hysterically, and wonders if it’ll always be like that, her emotions borrowed from the characters she puts on and then takes off like those expensive, one-party dresses, or maybe it’s the other way around? He sees the soft slump of her shoulder, like a flower folding and tilting down, its crown too heavy, and at least he got to be the one to tell her. It’s better than if she read it in some newspaper, the photo of him catching her eye, or maybe she’d notice Shiori’s dress first, so theatrical, something Ophelia could wear while lying to drown, only whipped-cream white. There’ll be lots of whipped cream, he’s sure, desserts laid out in front of him and Shiori and all he’ll be able to think: she wouldn’t even know which fork to use, and he'll press the teeth of the smallest of those forks into his palm beneath the stark tablecloth, imagining it to be her teeth like that day at the gala, and then he will spill some of his wine and pretend it to be his blood. After that, he will never feel anything again and there’s some sick relief in that. After years and years, he’s tired of all this feeling.

Her lip keeps trembling and he imagines hitting her, even though he would never, just to stop it, like killing a butterfly with one thump of a hand. He would never --

“It gets easier,” Mizuki promises, but he doesn’t believe her because he knows that, with time, things rot if they don’t get eaten.

He doesn’t even remember what they’d been talking about when he mentioned it – just to get it over with – but he supposed he was explaining, trying to explain, why he hadn’t been there for most of the rehearsals, busy, busy, so busy, his words echoing in the auditorium, whispered back to him to haunt him, the meaninglessness of it all. Small talk, one could say, and later, when he left the theatre, alone, the sunset sky like a heart pried open with sharp fingernails, the purple of his roses spilling out of the rip, heartbreak itself. Tragedies like this one, he thought, should happen in the dark, all the color hidden.

“After that one time,” she started after regaining some sense of composure, a forever of sadness in her eyes. He expected her to keep being Midori and to bite her lip like she had done the handkerchief that day but no, she wouldn’t, she had already decided, no doubt, no conflict. He could see it in her eyes – she would say this to him and then say nothing else, ever. “After that one time, we always used a red scarf, you know.”

Now, the only words they will ever exchange will be playscripts and bouquets sneaked into her changing room. He will keep sending them – it’s the one thing he has to keep. He can live without her next to him – he has, for years – but he can’t live without her. From now on, he will only see her on stage, always as someone else. The only glimpses of her he will get will be the bow at the end of the show, her laughter drowned out by applause, but that will be for everyone. That, and the interviews. He keeps all of them, ripped out newspaper pages folded into squares, in the only place he thinks safe – the inside pocket of his vest. All he learns from them is things he already knows – her passion, her drive. One interviewer asks about her favorite play and she misunderstands and says, oh, I love them all, really. The Forgotten Wilderness is something, but it’s like choosing a favorite child, I think. He knows some would think her self-absorbed but he only smiles sadly. It’s so her, plays no longer something to watch. For a long time now, he’s been the one sitting in a spaceship and she’s been the faraway galaxy star, something to watch, something one can’t touch. He supposes he has that to comfort him now – this gift of a night sky, wrapped in lines of text and stage lights, whispered in his ear as though it’s just for him, even though it’s only an illusion, even though she’s shouting, and to everyone.

*

If she knew, he thinks Himekawa Ayumi would kill him. He’s always seen her composed, but that doesn’t mean she is not one to tear people to shreds. It’s just that she disposes of evidence later, and the ribbons she makes of them curl oh so beautifully.

They’re similar in many ways, him and her.

Sometimes, he imagines her there at night, next to his bed, Carmilla again – these girls really are woven from the roles they play, aren’t they? – how she would dig her fingernails into his throat, till he’d bleed.

“You broke her heart,” she would say, the anger spilling over the edges, even though she has broken Maya’s heart, too, over and over again. He supposes she’s possessive like that – Maya is hers to hurt.

They’re similar in many ways, him and her, but so different in others. She can’t bear to see Maya hurt, unless it’s by her. He has hurt Maya over and over again and it always felt like a curse. All he’d ever wanted, really, is to see her smile. He thinks again of sitting in a dark theatre and her in the spotlight, being applauded, flowers thrown her way. He could throw one purple rose and then die right then and there, in one of the red plush armchairs, watching her beam. Death by heartache and that’s how he wants to go. Not pills swallowed down with alcohol, her photos scattered around him like dead butterflies, his body fighting against him, dumbly, wanting to live but caught in the clutches of a twisted theatre. He imagines people pushing past him, thinking him fast asleep and later – when he’s the last one left in the audience – someone finding him and checking for pulse.

But his pulse, he’s felt for years, is the beat trapped under her skin, his blood tuned to hers. He pitied his mother, for devoting all her life to one person, and he’s pitied his father for the same – the warmest emotion he’s ever felt towards the man – but here he is himself, feeling like the only reason for him is her. That’s why he lives, created just to love her, the ash of him clinging to her. He imagines himself buried, disintegrating six feet under, and the minerals of him washed through the Earth’s body, forever following her, like an underground shadow. Some people don’t have shadows at all – she will always have two. That’s the best he can be for her, too corrupt and too powerless to call himself a guardian angel and anyway, guardian angels don’t fall and don’t stumble to their feet, coated in the mud of their sins, their wings so heavy with it they will never lift them off the ground.

*

When he dies, he supposes he will go to a bad place, and meet Maya’s mother there. It’s a given he will meet her because the both of them, amongst the hellfire, will search for the one spot from which they’ll be able to see her best. Surely, their punishment will be something cruel, Tantalus’s fruit, maybe, but not the biggest cruelty of all – no windows, no view, no Maya to watch over.

You loved her, then? Maya’s mother will say and he knows she will understand his ugly, imperfect love, and all the hurt. After all, she’s the same.

We both broke her heart, he says when he visits Haru-san’s grave. But like masks, she seems to have a hundred of those.

A whole flock of small fist-sized bird hearts in that chest and, he imagines, one of them, battered and broken-winged, his.

*

“You’ll be a martyr, then?” the Sakurakouji boy says to him, all barely contained anger. Masumi thinks of when he was young like this, and then he remembers that he wasn’t, ever.

“She smiles when she sees you,” Masumi says, politely. There are dark bags under both their eyes, coffee stains on Sakurakouji’s shirt sleeve and a takeaway cappuccino in Masumi’s hand. Cheap, from a small, cramped café he knows Maya would like. He kept imagining her there, sat at a corner table, looking around and asking him for his lighter, touching it to the candle set between them. It smells like roses, here, she would say with a blissful smile and he imagined having thousands of them delivered to her house, so many she could swim in them. First, he’d have to cut off each rose’s thorns, though, of course. He likes his coffee bitter but he grabbed three sugar packets from the place and dumped them in the cappuccino without stirring. Maya, he knows, likes everything sweet.

“It says more that she doesn’t smile when she sees you,” Sakurakouji says, petulant, a child, really. Not naïve, though. Not that. “You think she will have me, as some sort of consolation prize?” he adds, bitterly.

“Would you agree to be one?” Masumi asks, finishing his coffee, the mouthful of half-dissolved sugar grains at the bottom coating his throat.

“_She_ wouldn’t agree to it,” Sakurakouji says, which, Masumi supposes, is some kind of an answer.

“She liked you once.”

They both know what weak word ‘like’ is. With Maya, all that matters is the all-consuming love of universes exploding to life from nothing, theatre and –

“Now, she will never like me again,” Sakurakouji sighs, and somehow, he sounds heartbreakingly mature. Masumi will remember him fighting, and trying, but for now he lets him be as he is, all out of hope. They both are, all out of hope.

“Well, at least you have the smile,” Masumi says, chucking the paper cup.

“You – You have the roses.”

Yes, Masumi does. Really, that’s all he’s ever had.

*

Heels click behind him and it’s still too light outside for Mizuki’s silhouette to reflect in the glass but it must be her. It’s always her. Those high heels.

He’s looking out the window in his office. Before, he wrote confessions on scraps of paper and folded them into awkward, crooked planes. He was going to throw them out the window but he couldn’t do even that, afraid someone twelve stories below would bother to unfold them, love letters hidden between the white. Thirty years old, and he doesn’t trust even the wind, even the pigeons, even the kids in the park.

“You can go home, Mizuki-san,” he says, Tokyo spread out in front of him, industrial, like something covered in scales, skyscrapers raising taller than temple spires. “I will finish up some paperwork and head home, too.”

He won’t. He’ll stay here till late night or early morning, drinking wine from a champagne glass he stole from a party once just because she’d drunk from it, her lip gloss still smudged on the rim. He’ll stay and drink, counting the hours like fingering rosary beads, praying the time away.

It gets easier, Mizuki promised, but he doesn’t think she’s ever been in love, not really. And if she's been, surely it was a kinder sort of love, warm dinners and rough laughter.

“I suppose it could be like a role in one of those romantic comedies,” says a familiar voice, not Mizuki at all. “Speak now, or forever hold your peace.”

Masumi breathes out and thinks, high heels? All grown up, now, his chibi-chan.

“You’ve come too far for romantic comedies,” he says, softly.

“There are no bad roles.”

“There are no bad weddings,” he counters, the lie so naïve he almost laughs. She does – a bright sound, but a stifled panic in it.

“I could just cry—”

“How beautiful you are,” he interrupts, finally catching her reflection in the glass. It doesn’t make sense for him to say that when she’s wearing a plain skirt and a washed-out shirt – no space for misinterpretation there, no chance that he means a dress, or a hairstyle – but he indulges himself, just this once.

“You don’t love her, do you? You can’t.”

“What does love have to do with it?” he says, trying to sound bored. He doesn’t turn and he doesn’t watch her reflection, either, the heartbreak there. A minute passes, maybe two, and he hears a soft sound as if she's opened her mouth to say something, but later there’s only high heels clicking.

“All grown-up,” he says quietly to himself and takes out the wine and fits his mouth over the dried lip gloss, still a bit of it left, sticky, saved for rainy days.

*

“I see, now,” Tsukikage says when she catches him watching Maya dance with some young hot-stuff. She’s holding a cane and he wonders if she’ll name the next Crimson Goddess or die first. Tick-tock, the clock whispers, and her blood must be so sluggish by now, about to lay to sleep.

“This heartbreak will be good for her,” Tsukikage goes on when he doesn’t reply. “It already is.”

He wants to argue but he supposes she’s right. Maya will take the sadness and the hurt and turn it into something that will be applauded by audiences and praised by critics. He doesn’t mind, really – he loves her for that, too. If she needed it, he would let her have a dress woven of his skin for one of her plays and he almost wants it, even. With her, it’s always this sweet morbidity, what he would do for her all over his heart like mold. The lengths he would go to—

“I’ve always been grateful, that you brought her here,” he says slowly. “And I am not one for thinking of what ifs.”

“You have funny ways of showing gratitude, then,” she says and then laughs, that crazy, witchlike cackle. He almost expects Maya to glance at them from across the room but she never does, caught up in waltz. They danced, once. He remembers it at the most random moments – while buying quick breakfast or crossing the street, the memory of her warm waist beneath his fingers and how at the time he wasn’t quite sure what it was yet, how it couldn’t really be anything but the roses. Every night, he remembers, he would dream of choking on purple.

“Why are you not bedridden?” he asks, glancing at Tsukikage, the crazy woman.

“It’s too late for me, already. Nothing will help me, not even pillows with duck feathers.”

*

In the end, it’s Maya, and he’s not even surprised because haven’t they all known, in a way, ever since the start, that it would turn out like that?

Of course it’s her, and he almost sends purple roses but, in the end, there has been no play.

He’s there when Tsukikage announces it, voice rasping, and Maya is disbelieving, shock bleaching her face white. Then, somehow, she smiles almost sadly.

Later, Sakurakouji will hand Masumi coffee. Latte – not his favorite – but there is that saying about a gifted horse, after all.

“Maya, she’s elated, naturally,” Sakurakouji says irritably. “You know what she told me, though? She said that she knows, of course, that she can’t have the two.”

“The two?” Masumi repeats, none the wiser.

Sakurakouji just looks at him with some mournful spite and Masumi thinks, ah.

Well, he’ll keep sending the roses. She will always have that, at least.

*

“I hate her, I swear I do,” Ayumi says when he helps her take the dishes into the kitchen after a small get-together at the Himekawa house, the servants sent home long ago. He glances at her and she’s impeccable as always, wounds licked clean. Well, on the surface, at least, but he and Ayumi, they’ve always been hidden, submarine.

“I do hate her,” she repeats stubbornly, and he wonders why she would tell him, of all people. Maybe she can sense it, that they’ve both lost everything. Maybe it clings to him like a smell. “But God knows, a part of me wanted her to have this.”

“The role,” he says, nodding his head.

“Yes, somehow,” she admits. “But also, you,” she adds, the most direct of all. He stares at her, dumbfounded and she reaches towards him, waiting for him to hand over the empty wine chutes.

“You can ruin industries with a wave of your hand,” she continues. “And you won’t do the same to your own misery?”

“Shiori-san is—"

“I pity that woman, really,” Ayumi says. “Doesn’t she see that you’re marble cold? Doesn't she feel it when you touch her?”

_I don't touch her._

"Marble cold," Ayumi repeats, like punishment.

Marble cold and only when a rose thorn pinches his skin he’s not, the drop of blood almost warm.

“I thought you’d be angry,” he says, weakly. He remembers Carmilla again, the vengeance of it. "Well, angrier."

“It’s not that I’m not. It’s just that you should be irrelevant. It’s supposed to be just acting, for me and her. Love only gets in the way. What if it ruins her?”

“If it were to, it would have, already.”

*

It’s the day before the wedding and he daydreams of Maya speaking up—

_speak now, or forever hold your peace_

hidden in one of the church pews, her strong, membrana-born voice raising louder than the organ pieces.

He dreams of her, and she’s walking towards him, stepping on all the masks she’s ever worn. They break beneath her feet, and she bleeds, but she smiles through it as if she doesn’t feel any pain.

_Have you ever seen me_, she whispers in his ear when she gets to him, adjusting his tie, clumsily, only making it more crooked. _Hold my peace? _

He imagines her not staying out in the rain before Beth and not blindfolding herself before Helen and not choking on mountain streams before Jane, and he can’t, but he has no hope anyway, because there are rules to this – like in a chess game – and the next move is not hers.

Still, he imagines her, speak now, or forever hold your peace, but – wonder of wonders – when she comes, it’s the day before that. She finds him in his office again – only you would be at work the evening before your wedding, Mizuki joked earlier, some sadness in it – no high heels this time. That’s how she surprises him, in a pair of flats, and when she speaks, he’s looking out the window again, his mouth forever over the dried lip gloss.

“It's quite late, isn't it?” she says, and when he turns around and sees her, he thinks that when he loses her the very next day, he'll have nothing more to lose.

“I was just leaving,” he tries, pathetic, the half-empty wine bottle on his desk and papers scattered everywhere.

“I object,” she says slowly. “Is that the sort of thing one says?”

“In court, I imagine,” he replies, humoring her. He always does, doesn’t he? “Well, there will be court, too, later. What are you doing, then?”

“Just practicing,” she says, this heartbreaking smile. “In case I don’t manage to convince you now and in case tomorrow does come, after all.”

Silly girl. She’s not even invited. Shiori had an invitation ready for her – so careful, hand-made, but he took one look at it and said, don’t. Now, as Maya smiles at him, he imagines them running hand in hand, trying to be faster than the sun, trying to outrun the days. Stupid – ha hasn’t truly run since he was about eight.

“Maya—”

“I won’t let you, and it will be a scandal anyway, no matter if we resolve this here or in that church. I do want to see it, though. I’ve heard the decorations are supposed to be lovely.”

He can’t help it – he laughs. He wants to tell her about Shiori blackmailing him, noose around her neck, kitchen knife at her wrists, shoe slipping on the edge of a cliff, but he can’t because he wants her to win this oh-so-much.

“I hate them all, really,” she says with passion. “Your father, Shiori-san, Mizuki-san, simply everyone. Hayami-san — no, Hayami Masumi. You might lose everything, go bankrupt, and I might never be offered another role, but I feel like risking it all anyway.”

“No more roles for you?” he repeats. “You wouldn’t bear it.”

For a moment, he expects her old fears and doubts, her childish anguish.

“There will be roles for me, always. I may have to crawl through dirt to get them but I’ve done so much worse, haven’t I?” she says slowly, watching him carefully, twenty and naïve but somehow wise, too. The confidence on her. “And I really do think people will be partial, don’t you? The theatre-goers, they’re all romantics at heart.”

“Shiori-san—” he argues, after all.

_So desperate to keep your love and she doesn’t even have it in the first place_, Mizuki said once, shaking her head.

“If you let me,” she says seriously, crossing the room in a few steps and reaching out, her small hands on his cheeks, almost squishing them. “I will protect you. From everything bad.”

“You don’t hate me, then?” he says, his voice breaking.

“I’ve always hated you,” she says earnestly and her thumb swipes against his skin. “But I’ve always loved you, too.”

He realizes that, no matter how many times he’s let himself think about her, he could never imagine them together, not really. She’s always been this faraway, unattainable dream, the one he would ultimately have to watch be snatched away by someone else and just the thought – them going to see a play together, them on holiday, them getting a place together – _ridiculous_. Now, for the first time, he wonders if he couldn’t ever imagine it because maybe he’ll get to live it.

“They’ve already baked this huge cake,” he says weakly, and he feels like he’s about to cry.

“Well, good!” she says enthusiastically. “I love everything sweet.”

He smiles.

“We have so much to talk about,” she says, but when she pulls his head towards her chest, and when he sobs into the cotton of her shirt, for the longest time, they’re quiet.

Later, she will whisper to him, I get to have the two, after all. And that makes sense, too, doesn’t it?

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading


End file.
